Beneath the Southern Cross (63 page)

Wally's disappointment at not being the star of the day, particularly to Tim who was a bit of a hero to him, disappeared as soon as he heard Tim's words. Wally was angry about conscription.

‘They don't pick your name, they pick a date, and if the date's your bloody birthday, you're buggered.' Wally plonked himself down heavily on the bench and leaned his elbows on his knees. He was panting and his face was bright red. ‘You're right, Tim, it's a bastard of a thing to do.'

‘Good match, Wally,' Tim said, ‘You've still got it in you. Why don't you go for a swim?' Wally really shouldn't do this to himself, Tim thought, he was carrying far too much weight.

‘Yeah, I reckon I might. But I tell you something,' Wally said as he rose to go, ‘they're not sending any bloody kid of mine to Vietnam. Over my dead body!'

Wallace William Kendall's name came up the following year. Or rather his birth date did, as did that of James Francis Hamilton.

Jim accepted his lot. He felt excited about it. If the truth be known, he wanted to go to war. He wanted to wear a uniform and carry a rifle and be a hero. Young Wallace, however, had other ideas. He had no intention of going off to risk life and limb for some country he'd hardly even heard of, but he didn't have to admit to that. After all, his father Wally Kendall had determined that, under no circumstances, would his son go to war. So young Wallace, dutiful son as he had always been, bowed to his father's wishes.

Wally had mates in high places and he made discreet enquiries. It appeared that deferment on the grounds of university studies was a common ploy and heavily policed by the authorities. It would have to be medical grounds then. But you couldn't take on the Commonwealth Department of Labour and National Service, you couldn't start at the top, you had to find a little man.

Through a mate, Wally got hold of a letter. Signed by an official with the title ‘Registrar', it granted release from national service on the grounds that the bearer did not meet the required standard of fitness.

This was what Wally needed for his son. But it was unlikely that this Registrar bloke was corruptible; even if he was, he was too important, too traceable. Perhaps the person who had typed the letter? But the letter was roneoed.

Somebody had to be responsible for such letters, however, Wally thought as he made his way to the National Service Registration offices. After he'd made some innocuous general enquiries, he asked the man behind the counter where the men's lavatory was and then disappeared for several minutes. Nobody noticed when he reappeared and took a wrong turning.

The typing pool was a long, rectangular room with a number of women, mostly young, little more than girls, seated at desks against the walls. With busy fingers the girls rattled away at their typewriters, the staccato clack of the keys like miniature castanets.

A bespectacled, middle-aged woman sat at a desk on a platform at the far end of the room, like a schoolmistress overseeing her class. Occasionally she left her own typewriter to prowl past the desks, peering at the girls' work and collecting from their out baskets.

Wally enquired after her name at the front counter and left.

Phyllis Pickford was a smart woman. A woman who could have done all the men's jobs in the department. A single woman, she had devoted herself to her career. She was as qualified as the men, more intelligent than most, but because she was a woman she had graduated to head of the typing pool and remained there for fifteen years. Although she enjoyed her position of power within the small area over which she reigned, Phyllis was just a little bitter at her lack of advancement.

‘Miss Pickford?' He greeted her as she left the offices two days later. He'd made his enquiries in the interim, and he knew a lot about her.

‘Yes.' Phyllis recognised Wally Kendall immediately. She had seen his picture in the business and social pages of the newspapers. In the flesh, despite the extra weight he was carrying, he was far more attractive than the newspaper photographs depicted; he was almost handsome in fact.

‘Wally Kendall of Kendall Markets. How do you do.' He offered his hand.

‘Mr Kendall,' she said and she shook his hand firmly, briskly, as if she met men of Wally Kendall's ilk every day of the week.

‘I wondered whether we might have a cup of coffee,' Wally smiled. ‘A little matter I'd like to discuss.' She was about forty-five, he guessed, and could have been attractive if she'd done something about her hair which was greying and scraped back into a severe French roll. And what did she have against makeup? Still, she'd kept her figure. Beneath the beige skirt and brown twin set was a neat little body.

She looked at her watch, pretending she had an appointment. ‘Yes,' she agreed, wondering what on earth Wally Kendall could want with her, ‘I have time for a quick coffee.'

‘I won't beat about the bush,' Wally said as they sat down at the booth in the far end of the coffee lounge. But he did, he needed to soften her up. He told her that his wife had died fourteen years ago, and that he'd been left with three children to rear on his own.

‘A son and two daughters,' he said, smiling fondly. ‘They were difficult times I can tell you, but I wouldn't swap those years watching them grow up for a thousand quid. ‘Course, they're nearly adults now. Well, Wallace is, he's twenty this year.'

He looked even more attractive when he spoke about his
children, Phyllis thought. ‘What exactly is it you want of me, Mr Kendall?' She asked the question gently enough, but she was direct, it was time somebody got to the point.

He told her. In no uncertain terms. And Phyllis was shocked. She stared at him, barely able to believe what she was hearing.

‘He's my only son, Miss Pickford,' Wally was still playing the fond father. ‘I'll do anything to prevent him going to war. His medical examination's next week. When the results come through, it'd be so easy for you, they're only draft letters, and of course I'd make it well worth your while …'

‘I'm sorry, Mr Kendall,' her lips were set in a thin, hard line, ‘what you ask is out of the question.' She rose to go.

‘Fifty thousand dollars.'

She sat down heavily. It was the shock. She needed to catch her breath. That was twenty-five thousand pounds! Australia had only recently converted to decimal currency and Phyllis still thought in pounds, shillings and pence.

‘In cash,' Wally added.

She must leave, the man was outrageous, she could not be bought.

He put his hand over hers. ‘Fifty thousand dollars is a lot of money, Phyllis.' There was concern in his voice, kindness, as if her wellbeing were important to him. ‘You could buy a house, you could set yourself up for life with fifty thousand.'

‘It's not as easy as you think,' she heard herself say. ‘It's more than just a draft letter, there is other correspondence, there are records, lists.'

‘I'm sure there are, but then you're a very clever woman, Miss Pickford.' Wally smiled winningly. Everyone had their price.

 

Kitty and Artie were only too grateful that their son Rob was too young to go to war, but they were nonetheless passionate in their anticonscription beliefs.

Kitty joined the SOS, a movement of mothers opposing the conscription of their sons for Vietnam, and she and Artie regularly took part in antiwar marches and sit-ins. They demonstrated alongside the ‘flower power' hippies who wore bright kaftans and beads, headbands and sandals. These youngsters reminded Kitty of herself at their age; youth didn't really change all that much, she thought.

Every evening Kitty and Artie sat glued to their television set, watching the American reports on the war, even footage of the combat itself filmed by intrepid teams of cameramen and war correspondents. Since the Australians' clumsy introduction to television in 1956, the medium had grown to become a sophisticated purveyor of the news, and it brought the Vietnam War into people's lounge rooms.

At the commencement of the Tet Offensive on 31 January 1968, when the Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops attacked US military installations throughout South Vietnam, television coverage showed that the Americans were not winning the war as they would have the world believe. People realised that they had been lied to and that the war was far from over.

Students were arrested for handing out ‘Don't Register' leaflets, and those draft evaders who openly burned their cards and refused to comply risked a two-year gaol sentence. Many fled the authorities, hiding out in safehouses provided by a network of supporters. One such safehouse was in Campbell Parade, where Kitty and Artie regularly took in conscientious objectors.

By 1971 the Farinellis' house served as more than a refuge. Paul Dundas, a leading figure in the Draft Resisters Union of New South Wales, hid in the rooms upstairs and held secret meetings there. The DRU was only one organisation amongst many actively opposed to conscription, but it had a high profile and its key members were keenly sought by the police.

One morning, after Kitty and Artie had been sheltering Paul for a number of months, the phone rang.

‘Quick, get him out. The police are here.'

Kitty recognised the voice of Andy Kaminskis from the pie shop downstairs. Andy had been in the country for fifteen years, but he still had a thick Latvian accent.

She raced to the lounge room and looked out the front windows to the busy street below. She could see no sign of police, but she had no reason to doubt Andy, he was sympathetic to their cause.

‘Paul,' she urged, running back to the kitchen, ‘the fire escape, quick, Andy reckons they're here.'

It was a Friday afternoon, Artie was at work and eighteen-year-old Rob at university. Thank Christ there hadn't been a meeting in progress.

Paul moved swiftly—two years on the run had taught him to be always at the ready for a quick escape. Shoving a couple of books into his backpack, he said, ‘Get rid of any pamphlets, they might have a search warrant,' then he was out through the back kitchen door and onto the small landing which led to the fire escape and the courtyard below.

Kitty grabbed the pamphlets from the drawer in the lounge room, ripped some into shreds and flushed them down the toilet. Then another handful. But they choked the cistern and remained swirling in the bowl.

She dashed into the lounge room and threw the remaining leaflets into the fire grate. Matches, where the hell were the matches, she'd given up cigarettes years ago.

Downstairs, Andy Kaminskis was pretending he had trouble with his English.

‘Policemen?' he said, looking the two plain-clothes detectives up and down, as if bewildered by the fact that they were not in uniform. One of them showed his identification. ‘Ah,' Andy said and ushered them into his shop.

The man who was doing the talking said something about a search warrant, and Andy made a great show of taking them both through his pie shop and into the kitchen out the back where his wife made the steak sandwiches.

As his dumpy little wife, flustered and genuinely confused, distracted the men in the kitchen, Andy glanced out the back door to the courtyard in time to see Paul throw his backpack over the paling fence.

‘You see?' Andy said from the doorway. ‘Is all clean, no dirt in my shop.' The policeman tried to step out of the kitchen but Andy barred the way. ‘You check the stove,' he insisted, ‘you see is all very clean in my shop.'

Senior Detective Fulham was irritated. Bloody immigrants. ‘We're not from the Health Department,' he snapped, ‘we're Commonwealth police. Now show us the rest of the place.'

‘Ah,' Andy nodded, seemingly impressed. ‘Commonwealth. Very important.' And he fumbled about for a moment, trying clumsily to get out of their way.

Of course he'd known they were Commonwealth cops, their car had been a dead giveaway. The moment he'd seen it pull up out
the front of the shop, Andy had known the HR Holden with the aerial in the middle of the roof was a Commonwealth police car. In the early days, when his papers had not been in order, Andy had learned to recognise any sign that might spell trouble.

By the time the detectives looked out the back, Paul had scaled the fence and disappeared.

The policemen examined the old reading room which had long been closed off and now served as a storeroom. Then, ‘Upstairs,' Fulham demanded.

Andy looked blank.

‘Show us upstairs.'

‘Ah. Upstairs.' Andy grinned. ‘Upstairs is not me. Upstairs is Farinelli's.'

The detectives looked at each other. ‘Bugger it,' Fulham muttered. They'd been given only a number in Campbell Parade. And the number had been in big, blatant lettering above the shop. They'd presumed the shop was the front for the DRU safe house.

The toilet cistern was still flushing when Kitty let them in. But there was nothing in the bowl. And there were fresh ashes in the grate, still smoking a little.